Use your Computer as a Production Machine (1):
| Category: Archive catalogue | Date: 2003-10-09 |
BASICS
A problem that seems to have been overlooked so far is, how to use your computer as a production machine. Its here for making you money, irrespective of what you are doing with it. And this simple fact requires some special attention.
Isnt it funny: All newsletters and ezines are full of the most extraordinary ideas what you can do by your computer (web design tricks, etc.). But every one seems to take it as a matter of course that your computer is always tip-top, without doing anything about it. Thats far from being self-evident. "Professional" computer users have to take quite some effort to keep their computer in full swing.
One obvious example of that is regularly doing "Backups". That is, taking a copy of (at least the most important) files and putting it aside. To recur to it only in case one of the original files is corrupted. (Or, heaven forbid, the whole computer is damaged and the original files are no more accessible.)
Backup, thats a matter too extensive to give you meaningful information in just one article. Therefore it will be spread over three articles:
Organize your harddisk
Daily, weekly, long-term backup
Batch-program for backup by pressing just one button.
In the "good old times" of computing, till about Windows 3.1, doing a backup was rather simple. It was enough to take a full copy of the entire harddisk. At that time, a harddisk was not yet greater than some 10 to 100 megabytes. By a special tape recorder called "streamer", or by a compression drive (zip, jaz, etc.), or by some other means this was a work of some minutes, up to about an hour. If you really needed to set up your computer anew, you just re-formatted the harddisk and restored all your files from the backup.
Today, however, with the arrival of the modern 32bit operating systems (e.g. Windows 95/98/NT/2000), a full backup is nearly a "shoot in the foot".
For one, it takes many hours to copy a harddisk of some gigabytes. During this time, obviously, the computer is fully occupied and unavailable for productive work.
Then, it requires an expensive equipment to copy that amount of data. (Well, there is a way for full backup even today. It is called "drive imaging" or "disk cloning". But thats too complicated for most computer users and should be left to hardware professionals.)
And, finally, a full backup does not help you very much. You only can re-format the harddisk and install the operating system again from the original installation CD-ROMs. Well, you might be able to restore individual files from your full-backup. But is this a good reason for taking all the pains?
Instead, you can do a more clever backup. It will not save you from some tough work if you should ever need to fully set up your computer once more. But this, fortunately, is rarely necessary with modern computers (unless you try a "dirty trick" with the operating system resulting in a complete user lock-out). Much more probable is that you are "destroying" a file indeliberately. (Not physically, making it inaccessible entirely. But you corrupt the logical structure of its contents. A processing step that always worked well then suddenly produces some queer results.)
Lets look at it in a more pragmatic way. Isnt it more reasonable to adopt a backup-strategy that does not devour too much of the computers productive time and to copy only those files that are most likely to be needed for individual restore? To be on the safe side, you might consider to apply a multi-level backup-strategy. (This will be described in the second article of this series.)
To do that, you should first consider which files are the most "precious" ones in your individual case. Those files that would either take too much time to restore them manually, or whose contents would be too expensive or impossible to re-gain. (For example, many files once downloaded from the Internet are actually unique. Should you be lucky enough to remember the URL where you downloaded it from, it might take money to download it again. Or, in our fast-paced times the very same URL could even be different next day.)
Let me suggest that you use the time till we meet again for considering this point: what are the files on your harddisk that would be hard or even impossible to restore? Put up a list of their extensions, and note in which directories these files are stored!
About the Author
Article by Gunter Gerdenitsch, owner of 1st Components Design, Universal Software Components for Computer Applications without Programming 1st-components.com, 1CD offers a product line called "DLG" for building applications without programming.
:To contact see details below.
gunter@1st-components.com
http://www.1st-components.com
A problem that seems to have been overlooked so far is, how to use your computer as a production machine. Its here for making you money, irrespective of what you are doing with it. And this simple fact requires some special attention.
Isnt it funny: All newsletters and ezines are full of the most extraordinary ideas what you can do by your computer (web design tricks, etc.). But every one seems to take it as a matter of course that your computer is always tip-top, without doing anything about it. Thats far from being self-evident. "Professional" computer users have to take quite some effort to keep their computer in full swing.
One obvious example of that is regularly doing "Backups". That is, taking a copy of (at least the most important) files and putting it aside. To recur to it only in case one of the original files is corrupted. (Or, heaven forbid, the whole computer is damaged and the original files are no more accessible.)
Backup, thats a matter too extensive to give you meaningful information in just one article. Therefore it will be spread over three articles:
Organize your harddisk
Daily, weekly, long-term backup
Batch-program for backup by pressing just one button.
In the "good old times" of computing, till about Windows 3.1, doing a backup was rather simple. It was enough to take a full copy of the entire harddisk. At that time, a harddisk was not yet greater than some 10 to 100 megabytes. By a special tape recorder called "streamer", or by a compression drive (zip, jaz, etc.), or by some other means this was a work of some minutes, up to about an hour. If you really needed to set up your computer anew, you just re-formatted the harddisk and restored all your files from the backup.
Today, however, with the arrival of the modern 32bit operating systems (e.g. Windows 95/98/NT/2000), a full backup is nearly a "shoot in the foot".
For one, it takes many hours to copy a harddisk of some gigabytes. During this time, obviously, the computer is fully occupied and unavailable for productive work.
Then, it requires an expensive equipment to copy that amount of data. (Well, there is a way for full backup even today. It is called "drive imaging" or "disk cloning". But thats too complicated for most computer users and should be left to hardware professionals.)
And, finally, a full backup does not help you very much. You only can re-format the harddisk and install the operating system again from the original installation CD-ROMs. Well, you might be able to restore individual files from your full-backup. But is this a good reason for taking all the pains?
Instead, you can do a more clever backup. It will not save you from some tough work if you should ever need to fully set up your computer once more. But this, fortunately, is rarely necessary with modern computers (unless you try a "dirty trick" with the operating system resulting in a complete user lock-out). Much more probable is that you are "destroying" a file indeliberately. (Not physically, making it inaccessible entirely. But you corrupt the logical structure of its contents. A processing step that always worked well then suddenly produces some queer results.)
Lets look at it in a more pragmatic way. Isnt it more reasonable to adopt a backup-strategy that does not devour too much of the computers productive time and to copy only those files that are most likely to be needed for individual restore? To be on the safe side, you might consider to apply a multi-level backup-strategy. (This will be described in the second article of this series.)
To do that, you should first consider which files are the most "precious" ones in your individual case. Those files that would either take too much time to restore them manually, or whose contents would be too expensive or impossible to re-gain. (For example, many files once downloaded from the Internet are actually unique. Should you be lucky enough to remember the URL where you downloaded it from, it might take money to download it again. Or, in our fast-paced times the very same URL could even be different next day.)
Let me suggest that you use the time till we meet again for considering this point: what are the files on your harddisk that would be hard or even impossible to restore? Put up a list of their extensions, and note in which directories these files are stored!
About the Author
Article by Gunter Gerdenitsch, owner of 1st Components Design, Universal Software Components for Computer Applications without Programming 1st-components.com, 1CD offers a product line called "DLG" for building applications without programming.
:To contact see details below.
gunter@1st-components.com
http://www.1st-components.com
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